Carly Fiorina Babes on Bayonets Campaign September 20, 2015
by William P. Meyers

Carly Fiorina, the Republican presidential candidate, likes to style herself as the woman who went from Secretary to CEO. Perhaps this bit of personal myth-making is part and parcel of normal political bio spinning. More important to note is her "babes on bayonets" campaign style. She sees in Hillary Clinton her own dark inner self. If I had to guess which candidate would be willing to okay slaying babies for fun or profit, or just to project power, it would be Mrs. Fiorina.

I don't think Carly was a particularly bad CEO at HP, as her opponents and numerous laid-off employees will try to paint her. She bought Compaq. The only real alternative to that was to get out of the PC business. She laid off a bunch of workers, which had to be done because both HP and Compaq had grown bloated with time.

It is not her business decisions with which I take issue. It is her political positions and the damaged-goods mind that they reflect that concern me.

Mrs. Fiorina did not begin life in the working class. Nor did she really begin her career as a secretary. She was the daughter of the very powerful Joseph Tyree Sneed, III, who was a government employee most of his life. He rose to be a Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court Judge. The Sneeds had plenty of money and Republican connections.

Carly (born Cara Carleton Sneed in September 1954) lived though the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s but apparently learned nothing from either. After a childhood of fancy schools she earned a B. A. in Philosophy and Medieval History from Stanford in 1976. As far as I can tell, many of her political ideas are from her medieval history classes.

Early failures are no problem for the children of the rich and power. Money and connections provide an endless string of second chances. Daddy bought her an MBA, then in 1980 she joined AT&T as a management trainee. You recall AT&T: "We don't care, we don't have to." She did well in the back-stabbing, ass-kissing, crony-capitalist bureaucracies of AT&T and then of its spin-off Lucent.

Now she wants to be President, even though she has never been Miss Popularity or elected to any kind of public office. Her strategy to emerge from a crowded field? Appeal to the Republican base with lies, exaggerations, and propaganda.

Her most frightening promise is to engage in the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. This would be at a time when the nation already is approaching owing $20 trillion in debt.

But she is right up there with Adolph Hitler when it comes to manipulating emotions. That is why she is lying about Planned Parenthood, whipping up the anti-abortion and anti-birth control voters. For the most craven of politicians this sort of Babes on Bayonets campaign is a proven strategy.

Sadly babies are killed from time to time by military means. Mostly conquering armies, in ancient times, where happy to simply enslave the losers. But we know that the Jews claimed to have exterminated the babies of their enemies the first time they invaded Israel: "And we took his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." [Deuteronomy 2:34] If the Jews did it, other armies did too.

But by Greek/Roman times, as more civilized ideas took hold, the killing of babies in war was looked down upon, though I doubt it ceased entirely. We see this reflected in the New Testament story about King Herod sending his men to kill the baby Jesus, but slaughtering other babes instead. Probably not a true story, since the Jews hated Herod and would have recorded it themselves, had it been true. If not true, it is an early Babes on Bayonets propaganda story.

The prototypical Babes on Bayonets story was a British Empire concoction during World War I. The German army asked permission to cross Belgium to attack its real rivals for global dominance, the French and British empires. Belgium was notorious for using mass murder and chopping off people's hands to extract wealth from Congo, and as a ally of the Brits and Frech refused passage to the Germany army. British propagandists accused German soldiers of throwing babies into the air and impaling them on bayonets for sport or practice. Not that the German Army was the Peace Corps, but it was a disciplined army that did no such thing.

The United States of America, as far as historians can tell, has never tossed babies into the air to kill them, but killing babies has not always been off limits. Slaughters of American Indians probably included killing children. Individual American soldiers in the Philippines War and later in World War II and Vietnam were reported to have killed some children, and some pregnant women. These cases were probably against orders.

But the big numbers were wracked up by the purposeful, mass bombings of civilian urban areas in Germany and Japan during World War II. The vaporization of large numbers of children at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is something I would expect Carly Fiorina to defend with every inch of her withered soul.

Carly's attacks on Hillary Clinton are vicious and untrue. Making false accusations and seeing what sticks was a political game played before either Carly or Hillary were born, but it has gotten out of hand these last few decades. Don't be surprised if Carly or a PAC supporting her shows a photoshopped picture of Hillary bayoneting a baby, or tearing into a child's neck like a zombie.

Women's rights? Who needs them when born into a rich, powerful family like the Sneeds. Rich people's rights will do you just fine, and America has plenty of those.

But I can say this for Mrs. Fiorina: I would vote for her before I would vote for some of her rival Republican candidates. The person I worry about is Senator Rubio. He's prettier than Hillary or Carly and he's young and arrogant enough to do something so stupid the entire world could be at jeopardy.

Bottom line is, Carly Fiorina is just plain crazy. She believes liberals caused the draught in California, that women should not have control of their own bodies, and that if you were not born as rich as she was, tough luck. Get a job as a management trainee (after you've used your bootstraps to get yourself a fancy college degree and an MBA) and make your corporate masters wealthier, if you want a bite of the pie.